Graphite
by DT Maxwell
Summary: Poetry was for getting her thoughts out of her head. Drawing was for getting out her memories: the good, the bad, and even the almost forgotten. Sixth in the Downtime series.


**Disclaimer:** _Mass Effect_ and all related concepts and characters belong to Bioware; I'm just playing in their sandbox.  
><strong>Series:<strong> Downtime  
><strong>Notes:<strong> So this ended up a lot more angsty than I intended; Jack's a really messed up girl. Also, updates in the Downtime series are going to be much farther in between – my summer's getting a lot busier and I'm still beating back my writer's block. Regardless, I am going to do my damnedest to see this series through to the end!

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><p>Ten minutes past noon ship time.<p>

Shit, she was bored. Not a whole lot for a biotic ex-convict to _do_ on a ship, anyway. Practicing her biotics in the hangar only held so much appeal, especially since explosions were explicitly Not Allowed on board, and sparring with Grunt was out of the question without fucking adult supervision.

(That lesson had been worth it: she'd learned a _lot_ of new swears and insults from the resulting dressing down she and Grunt had received from Shepard. The old vids about Marines had not been exaggerating, apparently.)

Ah, fuck it.

Jack rolled to her side and groped around in the space beneath her cot until she found the strap of her bag. Omega had been the _Normandy_'s first stop after picking her up from Purgatory and after Shepard had handed her a credit chit ("Everyone gets a paycheck, here's your first. Do whatever you want with it, have fun, but don't blow anything up or kill anyone, otherwise _you_ get to deal with Aria's resulting hissy fit.") she had made a beeline to the main marketplace. The bag had been the first thing she'd bought; it was old, probably been owned by three or four people before her, but it was surprisingly sturdy and big enough to hold a lot of crap. Once she was back on the ship, she had snagged thread and a needle from the closet where they stored the uniforms and repaired the few holes the bag had, as well as the strap that was four strands short of completely snapping.

(So she knew how to sew, big deal. Had to be self-sufficient, including mending any tears she got in her clothing. A big enough needle could also be used to cause someone a really fucking nasty eye injury, too, which was _always_ handy.

Damned if she could explain why the hell she'd sewn an SR-2 patch on to her satchel, though.)

She pulled the bag out of its hiding place and into her lap, then flipped the cover up and tugged it open. Inside lay what few worldly possessions she'd picked up since getting out of Purgatory: a beat up old datapad (also bought from the Omega markets) on which she wrote most of her poems, some eyeliner and lipstick (anyone who said you couldn't be badass and pretty at the same time would receive a broken spine thank you _very_ much), her omni-tool (bought from a reputable dealer on the Citadel for too much money and warranty voided three times over by a madly giggling Kasumi, then Tali channeling her inner mad scientist, and finally _both_ the tech-heads in what could only be described as a competition for bragging rights as Ship's Biggest Nerd), and a set of poker chips (quietly taken from one of Omega's gambling dens when a fight had started at the blackjack table and quickly descended into an all-out brawl that had spilled out to the street).

Jack ignored them all, instead reaching into the secondary compartment to pull out her real treasures: a hardbound eight-by-ten sketchbook with thick, acid-free paper and a soft-sided case containing fifteen woodcased pencils, a few colored pencils, two black pens, a pencil sharpener, and a kneaded eraser, as well as an aerosol can of fixative. They had cost her nearly two weeks' worth of pay at a little hole-in-the-wall specialty store in Shin Akiba, but shit, it had been money well spent.

She dumped the bag on the floor and sat upright, settling herself cross-legged on the cot with the sketchbook in her lap and the pencil case and fixative set off to the side. She opened the sketchbook and began to flip through the pages, passing by both half-assed sketches and finished drawings.

Flick – the Chair, starkly lit and covered in stains and a fucking nightmare in and of itself, though the real one has been blown to Hell –

Flick – a meadow covered in wildflowers all in bloom, a huge oak at its center, with a rope-and-wood swing hanging from its branches –

Flick – Shepard cleaning her Widow during a stop on Tuchanka, perched on a pile of rubble with Urz napping at her feet –

Flick – one of the "doctors" from the Pragia facility, features twisted and deformed into a demon with a leering, mocking smile –

Flick – Joker and Garrus arguing about something stupid over dinner, with Joker using his fork to point accusingly at Garrus, who was doing the same, and Jacob in the background looking like he was going to put _both_ their heads into the table if they didn't stop acting like idiots –

Flick – and finally an unfinished portrait of a woman, the face still void of features, though her dark hair and ratty old sweater had been shaded in meticulous detail.

'_No time like the present, I guess,'_ Jack thought as she opened her case and took out a sharpened pencil and the kneaded eraser. She palmed the eraser in her left hand, twisting it between her fingers, set the tip of her pencil to the paper, and began to draw.

A few sweeping curves gave her the basic shapes for the mouth, nose, eyes, and eyebrows. The eyebrows she shaded in quickly in fast, sharp strokes to mimic short hairs, and used a slightly longer stroke to bring out eyelashes. She colored in the pupils, using her kneaded eraser to pick out highlights, but left the irises uncolored for the moment.

The rest of the face filled out in a similar fashion: lots of heavy shading for darker areas like the nostrils and lips, bringing out highlights by removing small areas of graphite with the eraser, using her fingers to gently blend light shadows to define the brow and cheekbones and the sharp tip of a fresh pencil to define smaller details like the lines near the eyes and mouth and the slight wrinkle in the eyelids.

Once the majority of the face was complete, Jack turned her attention back to the blank irises. She brought the tip of her pencil over, but stopped short of beginning to shade in the irises; she put the pencil back in the case and rummaged through it for a few moments before removing three of her carefully used colored pencils: gold, dark brown, and green.

The gold she used first, coloring around the pupil lightly and pressing down harder to deepen the color closer to the iris's edge, then layering over it with the brown. She used the green to color in a bold circle around the very edge of the iris right over the other two layers, and repeated the same on the other eye.

Satisfied, Jack set her pencils down and sat back to finally examine the drawing as a finished piece – and swallowed.

The woman was in her early to mid-thirties and she had the slightly weathered features many residents from the agricultural colonies in the Attican Traverse shared. Instead of being set into an expression of grim determination the stereotype applied to colonists, though, this woman was smiling broadly, her eyes crinkled in pure pleasure as she looked out from the paper. Jack could hear the woman's voice in the back of her mind, rich and velvety, memory long suppressed by physical and mental tortures finally rising to the fore.

'_I live on the most beautiful planet in the galaxy,'_ the woman was saying. _'I own my own piece of land and I can do whatever I want with it, be it raise cattle or grow corn or both! And I've got the prettiest and brightest little girl in the whole universe as my daughter. What more could I want?'_

Jack blinked rapidly – like Hell she was going to cry, especially when she still had to use the fixative on the paper to keep everything from smudging – and reached out to gently touch the portrait's cheek.

"Hi, Mom."


End file.
